THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEXES TRAE STEPHENS

The venture capitalist and cofounder of the defense-tech startup Anduril has worked with Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Palmer Luckey, and Elon Musk.

- STEVEN LEVY

TRAE STEPHENS' ORIGIN STORY BEGINS like the first volume of a spy thriller series. Galvanized by 9/11, he vowed as a high schooler to find a career that would let him defend his country. He applied to colleges with programs that could prep him for that heroic role. None were interested in a kid from a hardscrabble Ohio town, so he traveled uninvited to Washington, DC, barged into the applications office at Georgetown University, and talked his way into the School of Foreign Service, where among other things he learned Arabic. After graduating, he joined a US intelligence agency (he can't say which one), where he used his education as a "computational linguist" to do a kind of desktop counterterrorism. But it wasn't long before he became frustrated by the red tape-and the lousy IT setup.

Here, though, Stephens' story diverged (somewhat) from that of the storybook secret agent with all the guns and martial arts tricks. During his time at ... wherever he was ... he met people at a Silicon Valley startup called Palantir, which set out to use deep data mining to win government contracts. Stephens signed on. After a few years, the venture capital firm backing Palantir, Founders Fund, offered him a job on the investment team. He found himself in the midst of Silicon Valley's attempt to create companies that sell military and data-science tech to the government. He reports to Peter Thiel, the Valley's most notorious conservative.